Quantum COmputing

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times Stan Williams, right, a senior fellow and founding director of the Information and Quantum Systems Research Lab at Hewlett-Packard gives an update to Paul Rosenberg, left, an engineer, on a photonic optical broadcast bus they are developing at the H.P. Labs in Palo Alto, Calif.

It’s clear that you’re deep in the belly of a research and development lab when someone starts talking smack about his ability to manipulate light.

In this case, R. Stanley Williams, the director of quantum science research at Hewlett-Packard, thinks his company has an edge over its close partner, Intel, when it comes to using lasers instead of copper wires to push data around computing centers at amazing speeds.

H.P., Intel, I.B.M. and a small group of other companies have their researchers charging after a holy grail of sorts in data centers. They want to create commercial photonics systems that will replace wires as the principal means of moving data between computing systems and between the components in computing systems. An even more daring pursuit revolves around using light to control data on computer chips.

While the cost of such technology proves too great for mainstream use today, the researchers believe they can bring the price down and demonstrate incredible increases in networking performance through photonics. Such breakthroughs should prove crucial to keeping the overall performance of computers increasing at historical rates, since it’s the communications between things like memory, hard drives and processors that often limit hardware designers today.

During a recent visit to H.P.’s labs, I saw the fruits of Mr. Williams’ labor firsthand in the form of an optical mid-plane for blade servers. (I know, I know, it’s the stuff that dreams are made of.)

If you’re a hardware sicko like me, then witnessing a working optical mid-plane is actually quite moving. (Someone pass me a tissue, please.)

Hardware makers today connect tens of compact blade servers into a shared hunk of metal, the mid-plane, which helps the computers communicate. This hunk of metal is a true hunk. It’s about as big as, say, a 24-inch flat-screen television and perhaps a bit heavier, depending on your brand of server and TV.

H.P. has a working prototype optical mid-plane, produced in conjunction with a toy manufacturer, that’s smaller than a standard rolling pin.

The new H.P. mid-plane can shuffle data around 1,000 times faster than today’s hardware.
Peter DaSilva for The New York Times A photonic optical broadcast bus.

The speed and flexibility of H.P.’s mid-plane would let customers move software around blade servers at very high rates, meaning that businesses could funnel applications between servers with ease. Such techniques support another holy grail, which is data-center-wide software virtualization where applications can move at high speeds between physical systems.

I’ve seen similar prototypes at Intel’s labs, where the company also takes pride in its silicon photonics work.

You might think Intel has an edge with such technology, since manipulating silicon is its core business and since much of this work revolves around chips. But that’s not the case, according to Mr. Williams.

“It’s a friendly rivalry, but we think we are a lot better at optics than they are,” Mr. Williams said.

Hopefully, there will be plenty of security on hand at the next silicon photonics summit.

H.P. looks to gain an edge over competitors like I.B.M., Dell and Sun Microsystems by popping its optical systems into products as soon as possible, although that may take a number of years. It will most likely start by selling the optical modules in server hardware aimed at laboratories and businesses willing to pay a higher price for top performance.

“Those sales should help drive down the cost,” Mr. Williams said.

Eventually, H.P. wants to put optical components in a wide variety of hardware from switches right down to PCs. If all of the major systems in a computer used photonics as opposed to copper wires, the computer’s performance would rise by a factor of 20, Mr. Williams said.